I’ve been on the fence about the open office and how the prevailing opinion among management people is just how big of a dumb fad the open office really was (/ is, as there are many of us who will be open-officing for as long as it takes for the ROI to take full effect from all the painting of the walls and deconstructing of the work spaces).

Lately, I’ve been working through the chatter, which can be maddening. A person needs a quiet space to concentrate. My friend – at another company - closes her door just to put her head down on her desk sometimes. Whoever said you had to be flying like bullets all day to be effective? I tried to indicate as much to my boss as he was discussing how to pass down working hours to the team. I think it’s ok to say that 8-5 is a standard day if people ever take a break, which they rarely do where I work. It’s really a 9 hour day with no break. And if you’re expecting people to arrive at 7 and leave at 545/6pm, I predict a full-on productivity mutiny. People take it back in their own way when you micromanage their time.

Do I want my projects up and off the ground quickly? Yes. That does not mean running the team into the ground to get to it. I would like these people I work with to have something else to give in the latter half of the year.

Why not just talk to the few people who are creating the need to address the matter in the first place? We agreed on that point.

We have new moms on the team, too, and nothing is more upsetting than passing your newborn kid off to some childcare provider, no matter how trusted they are. You’re looking at the course of the day wanting to be back with your child again. (that’s how I felt, but I also used to surprise my first childcare person with surprise visits in the middle of the day until I found her sound asleep in a house full of crying babies and then it was ON)

I’m still preparing to host that week-long get together in Arizona at the end of the month and I will not have much time between now and then to work on the materials, collaborate with the people who are co-hosting, and dial it all in to make the time productive and rewarding for those who are attending. I am of the mind that something is as rewarding as the effort each person puts into it, but I’ll give it my best try to make it palatable.

I have been reminding myself of the five-year-rule: will any of this matter in five years – a question I have asked myself for the last 2 decades of my life, on and off, when things are really difficult. It brings reality back into focus when considering just how ridiculous immediate concerns can be. Mostly, it’s just chatter, and needs to be dismissed.

An article on FRB’s (Fast Radio Bursts) caught my eye today. Either we are being contacted by a far-off force, or it’s an astrophysical cause like the leftovers of a supernova, which is when a star dies, or explodes creating a brightness that dissipates – it’s maybe the radio waves that dissipation generates that is the burst we are hearing.

It is so far away and it’s repeating nature is speculative, at best. It could be the attempts to give a repeating pattern from an intelligent life form looking for others out there. It could be the equipment malfunctioning.

If the universe is infinitely bigger than anything I can comprehend, it is possible to have a completely functioning set of life forms, the same or something I would not recognize, out there, on the other side of our solar system, so far away as the two cannot touch each other. But, one day, some gnarly scientist figures out a way to send a very long-distance signal, which is, intercepted after a near-forever period of human evolution, when we are finally able to receive such messages.

And this could well be a gripping sci-fi novel, and likely has been already.

I’ve been paying attention to the plot lines of movies and books a lot more lately. If you are a writer, then you write, and I’m following that rule down to the very page these days, and for me it includes self-awareness about how others are writing.

A giant amount of storylines are oriented around this one concept:

former state infused with trust > betrayal of trust > regret > new state with 1) lesson learned or 2) lesson not learned or 3) no sense of whether or not lesson is important to the plot

Some stories just end, kind of meh-style.

I watched 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri the other night. That just ended on a “this is how it is” note. Not too far from the truth on the aftermath of a crime.

If everything fit neatly into a categorized box, and if there were shelves and spaces for every box to live, it would not be the life we know now.

Life as we know it is full of messy details scattered everywhere. We are a collection of those details, our very own history, like it or not. It’s really the not-liking of our flaws or messiness that causes us the most grief. Creates the self-loathing. Old people will tell you to brush off the disappointments in life and be something right now. The right now, the present moment, you know where I’m going with this...

I was reading up on radical self-acceptance at the prompting of a friend who knows I have enough self-loathing for an entire nation of prairie dogs, who are an underserved population when it comes to self-loathing, I suspect. It is really something to look upon yourself as you are, not as we fight to make ourselves appear before the world.

Oh yes there is a difference, most of the time! I hear you though, we would like to think we are not overdoing it on our efforts to hide our weak spots.

I was getting my eyes checked last week, got new lenses so I can see better. The eye doctor told me my eyesight hasn’t been great from the start, and it will not get better. He said we work pretty hard to pretend we are not losing ground in some places of our lives, but that is the reality of it. I know, you’re thinking: that message to customers is so bad for business! To point out the reality of our degrading bodies (and minds, if we are being really truthful) is just way off the ranch for some customers – apparently he did not think I was one of them, or he says that to everyone.

Do you want to be lied to forever? Not me. More often than not, I will put it out there to myself, to others. It has had some disturbing effects over the years.

We all face the truthfulness of our circumstances as a human anyway, and denial just makes it more painful. That does not mean everyone wants a piece of my opinion. You included. I wish I could be different and I suppose with every breath, I am trying.

I am coming to terms with it all, this whole shooting match of being a person.

Maybe just a little bite a day at a time is best.

I was working away this morning when I heard a loud crash, which was accompanied by either a cloud of dust or smoke – it smelled like smoke, something plastic burning. It reminded me of the quickening of our lives. I remember feeling my son move on the inside of me at 3 weeks, it was what prompted me to check to see if I was pregnant. That, and smelling raw meat was suddenly unbearable.

It was a rare feeling, one I felt again this morning. A little closer to touching what our lifeblood is? A little taste of the distance between here and not here? Hard to describe.

I felt it one other time when I was running for my life in a pasture in England, a place behind our subdivision, a wild place with bunkers from WWII still evident here and there – bunkers I would never go into because all the druggies did H there.

No, we had only been playing together, us girls, running around pretending some game when we spotted him walking down from one of the old cotton mills. From far off, I remember thinking, pay attention to thatand I did, and as he got closer it was clear he was intending to come into contact with us.

When he really made his intentions known, everyone split up. I ran as hard and as fast as I could. I put a big pond between the two of us and then slipped out of sight into a thicket. It was summer and the leaves hid me. (thank you, Mother Nature, goddesses)

I held my breath as he ran by, and the moment he did, I felt a strange feeling occur. It was as though I was coming into contact with something other-worldly. Prickly electricity. I took off toward home the moment he passed me, running in the opposite direction. I hate to be chased. Usually, if someone is chasing me, I would sooner stop and confront them than be caught up to. Not a great strategy. Except that day, I ran like hell. I found my friends. We exchanged breathlessness and terror, then we told our parents and got a snack. Life went on.

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The Minimum

Creating within the protective, mildly narcissistic/over-sharing shell; low-scale pressure, nothing to live up to except to frequently teleport into the open field of mind-space. I have turned off the comments section; if you're burning to talk with me, click the icon at the top of the page and send me an email.